TASTEWISE
Sherry, anyone?
HUGH AND COLLEEN GANTZER
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The Sandeman sherries, so ubiquitous during the days of the Empire, continue to thrive today due to innovative marketing.
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The Don Fino was a delicate, dry white wine, crisp on the palate and would have gone well with seafood.
Photos: Hugh and Colleen Gantzer
Success through the centuries: At the Sandeman vineyard in Spain.
When storks build their nests atop the chimneys of buildings, and twittering swifts tuck their mud dwellings under the eaves, good fortune follows. Or so many Europeans believe.
Such conventional wisdom was justified in the case of the House of Sandeman in Spain’s Jerez de la Frontera. There, soil, situation and strategy created a legend. Back in 1805, Sandeman used a fire-brand to burn their “Crowsfoot” SG&C mark onto their wooden casks, effectively pioneering Branding. But that wasn’t all. In the next century they launched the mysteriously elegant icon of The Don. Wearing the wide-brimmed Spanish caballero’s hat, and draped in a Portuguese student’s black cape, it captured the prestige and exclusiveness of two of the very special wine-producing areas of Iberia.
Thus, Sandeman effectively pre-empted the so-called “innovative” strategies of 21st century marketing gurus!
Canny business sense
All this was created by a canny 18th century Scottish trader named George Sandeman. Lured by the products of warmer lands, he set himself up as a wine merchant importing Sherry from distant Jerez.
It was a good choice. Sherry is a wine unique to the Jerez area. Driving 110 km out of Seville, we wound through gently undulating chalky hills: low in nutrition, ideal for the white grapes used for sherries. Orange trees shaded the forecourt of the Sandeman winery and, when we strolled through their vine-draped atrium, under the high nests of the storks and clay colonies of the swifts, we saw murals depicting the harvesting and crushing of grapes. Their juice, known as must, is then allowed to ferment in stainless-steel vats in a process common to all wines.
Now, however, as a guide explained to us, sherry-making takes a unique turn. We walked through a long cellar of American white oak casks, stacked in rows one atop the other. Here the new sherries rest for a year while a yeast, called flor, grows on the maturing wine. This native yeast decides whether each cask of sherry should become a fino, amontillado or oloroso. Humans do not interfere in the action of this fungus.
We paused in a continuation of that cloister-like gallery. The air was rich with the yeasty aroma of fermentation. In other wines, we were told, the alcoholic content is breathed out through the pores of the wooden barrels, and moisture is breathed in. Here, in sherry’s special solera system, the reverse occurs: the water in the wine evaporates slowly and the alcohol is concentrated.
Now the criaderas, or nursery system, starts.
If we had come a few days earlier, we’d have seen a practice dating back to 500 BC: the sampling of the wines in the casks using the silver cup mounted on a long bone handle called a venencia. Depending on the opinion of the expert taster, the capitaz, the sherries will be blended. The youngest sherry, generally from the topmost barrels, will be poured into the casks in the next row to replenish the amount that has evaporated, and so on to the lowest row containing the oldest sherries. These mature sherries will be bottled many years after the must had first been crushed from the harvested Spanish grapes.
Unique flavour
At the end of our slow tour, we sat on wooden benches at wooden tables, and sampled three of the sherries. The Don Fino was pale gold and it had matured for at least five years. It was a delicate, dry white wine, crisp on the palate and would have gone well with seafood. The Dry Don, an amontillado, was slightly sweet and its amber colour had picked up brown highlights from the table. We felt it would be excellent with cheeses and perhaps tandoori dishes. The Oloroso Armada was almost a ruby red, sitting on that polished wooden table. We believed that it would be great on its own, chilled; or with ice. We would also have liked to have tasted an Amoroso — the Spanish word for “loving” — because that was the sort of sherry that was a favourite in India pre-1947. It also improves in the bottle.
There is little doubt that the popularity of Sandeman Sherries owes a great deal to the fact that its emergence coincided with the expansion of the British Empire. As a purely Spanish drink it might have been ignored. But as a special wine produced by a Briton, in Spain, it featured in all formal evening festivities as both an aperitif and a dessert wine. The Don was always present in such parties thrown by many generations of our family. Perhaps that is why a Sandeman official tried to convince us that sherry should now be quaffed in filled wine-glasses and not sipped as a liqueur in minuscule quantities!
The nesting birds have clearly endorsed Sandeman sherry’s continuing, innovative, marketing thrusts into our competitive 21st century.
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